Normally, the twenty minutes spent passing from the North Pole down over Canada and the continental United States to the equator were downtime devoted to signal relaying and reprogramming. This orbit, the gyros hummed and locked the telescope on several spots in a dead east-west line running through the high mountains of southern New Mexico. If the computer knew slang, it would have called this operation a piece of cake. The signal carrying orders from the ground had not called for highest resolution, the capability to distinguish letters on a license plate, only enough detail to discern a car from a house.
Light from the Sun scattered in the Earth’s atmosphere, bounced off the New Mexico landscape and was reflected upward. The mirror in the satellite gathered a tiny portion of this light and focused it as an image on a photocathode. A sweeping electron beam converted the lights and darks of the image into electrical impulses and the on-board computer converted the impulses to immutable numbers. A beam of radiation, modulated and encoded with those numbers, shot to a receiving station on the ground at the speed of light. This signal was relayed to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland where it received routine preliminary computer processing to decode the signal and remove the worst of the spurious electronic noise. Without pause, the signal was then relayed by special laser-driven glass fiber cable, immune to interception, to receiving equipment and a computer in CIA headquarters. This computer produced an electronic signal that reproduced a picture of the mountainous terrain on a special TV screen. A hard-copy photograph was taken of the screen, suitable for humans to scan and bicker over. Scarcely half an hour had passed from the time the special order had been sent up to the satellite to the time the camera shutter clicked.
As the photograph moved through the automatic developing process, the satellite coasted over the equator above the eastern Pacific Ocean. It would rest over the Pacific and Antarctica except for occasional records of ships. Things would pick up as it tried to collect data on the movement of the Soviet fleet in the Indian Ocean. There would be several frantic minutes in the vain attempt to monitor troops and rebels in Afghanistan, then the well-established routine over mother Russia herself. As the Arctic ice cap slipped underneath, the cycle would begin again.
Wednesday evening Isaacs sat in his study, the smells of supper beginning to romance his nostrils.
“Dad!” Isabel’s young girl volume resounded down the corridor. “It’s for you!”
He reached for the extension.
Even before she came on the line, from the long-distance hollow echo, broken by occasional radiophone static, he knew.
“Bob?” her voice was tense, excited.
“Pat?” His flat reply.
“Bob, he was right! It’s got to be a black hole! It almost hit us, came up right outside the tent. You could feel it, Bob! The pull, from its gravity, it knocked me over. Ellison is starting to analyze the computer records, but I just don’t see how there can be any doubt.”
Silence.
“Bob?”
“Sorry. That’s good work.” He was suffused with a bone-weary fatigue. “It’s just so hard to accept. I was trying to think of what to do next.” How was he going to explain this to Drefke, to the President? Damn! Why had he brought the Russians, Korolev, into this? He certainly didn’t want to hassle with them now.
“Have you started the site survey?”
“Yeah,” he confirmed. “We got the satellite time on an emergency basis, shots of every site on the trajectory, north and south latitude, at the right altitude. The satellite should be working now, and we should have the first cut tomorrow morning. Then we can go back to anything that looks promising.”
“I wonder what we’ll find?” she asked the question slowly, rhetorically.
“Pat, right now I haven’t the faintest damn idea. Let me know if Gantt’s analysis turns up anything interesting. I’ll get hold of the Director tonight and see if I can explain all this to him.”
“Okay, good luck. You’ll let me know what the site survey turns up?”
“Right.”
“Bye.”
“G’bye.”
He hung up the phone and stared at it, unseeing. He knew he should eat before calling Drefke, but his appetite had vanished.
Pat Danielson slipped back into the tent and took a chair next to Runyan who leaned over Gantt’s shoulder, watching numbers do formation exercises on the terminal.
“Did you get him?” Runyan swiveled his neck to look at her.
“Yes. He didn’t sound too happy.”
“Not the kind of thing you get happy about.” Runyan paused a moment, contemplating. “I guess I feel relief. The peril is real and immense. I don’t think any of us really appreciate in our guts the danger we’re in. But I’m relieved that it’s out in the open now so we can deal with it head on.” He turned back to the terminal. “Ellison’s finding out what our friend is really like.”
Danielson maneuvered her chair so she could see. Gantt pointed to the luminescent figures. “You see the seismometers saturated when it got too close, so they stopped giving any useful information.” He played with the keys some more. “The gravimeter here in camp also went off scale. They’re meant to measure fluctuations of a part in a billion, and this one was at one percent before it pooped out. The outer stations were fine, though; here’s the mass they detected, a bit over ten million metric tons. That’s just about what you guessed, wasn’t it, Alex?”
“Pretty close,” admitted Runyan. He thought for a while and then asked, “How long were the seismometers inactive?”
Gantt consulted the computer and then replied, “Twenty- eight point— well, call it an even twenty-nine seconds, why?”
“Maybe we ought to go back to your tent where we can talk this over,” Runyan replied.
They left the equipment tent and walked toward Gantt’s.
Wary glances followed them. All over the camp men stood in groups of three and four, discussing the strange event in muted and not so muted tones. Runyan and Danielson occupied the chairs they had first sat in upon their arrival, only a few hours ago. Gantt disappeared inside the tent and returned with three styrofoam cups and a bottle of bourbon.
“A bit early in the day for normal circumstances,” he said, “but I could use a little bracer. Will you join me?”
The other two nodded their acceptance and received their cups in turn. Runyan took a fairly healthy slug and looked on with mild surprise as Danielson drained hers in one quick motion and held it out to Gantt for a refill.
Danielson caught Runyan’s look, grinned, and said in a voice hoarsened by the liquor, “All us Virginians are bourbon drinkers, suh!”
Gantt smiled at the quip and raised his cup to gesture a toast, “Well, here’s to the future; may it not be entirely black.” He continued with a shake of his head, “I must say that was the most god-awful feeling. I had the definite impression that you people had snuck up on either side of me and lifted my chair and then dropped it. All this instrumentation and electronics are well and good, but they’re no substitute for being grabbed and shaken to let you know you’re up against the real thing. The idea that that thing actually came up within, what, two or three yards of the tent? Jesus!” He drained his cup and poured another dollop.
“Did you feel a sideways pull?” inquired Danielson. “That’s what bowled me over. I had one foot in the air when someone raised the floor and then gave me a shove.”
“I guess maybe I did,” answered Gantt, “but I was sitting down, so that took some of the edge off.”
“You’re right. The thing must have come up just outside the tent,” Runyan joined in. “Must have been one of those times when it got jarred off course somehow. Actually, in spite of the low probability, it’s lucky no one was hit. I was thinking, Pat may have had a good idea; it might be of some interest to find the hole it made coming out and the other falling back in. Apparently that occurred just a bit further to the east, near the edge of camp. I think we may have learned something important here, in addition to having the wits scared out of us.”